What does middle class mean to you?

Well yes, Kitty of course! 4 x 4's, unruly children with really weird names, unthinking and bad mannered! On the other hand 4 x 4's, well turned out perfectly mannered children with names like George and Alice, very caring and volunteer a lot for no reward. Takes all sorts!

DH told me that although during the day, the 'women' could mix at such things as coffee mornings etc that were organised by officers' and sgt majors' wives, in the evenings if there was a social event it was back to what rank the husband held: Corporals' Mess, Sergeants' Mess, and Officers' Mess. No-one from different ranks was allowed to mix/socialise in these unless invited. Many good friendships have been lost because a soldier has been given promotion.

Quite a generalisation there NfkDumpling.

Just reading the thread about children giving up their seats and remembered a bus driver telling me that children and adults from council estates always thanked her. Those from the middle class 'GoldenTriangle' rarely did. Bad manners and thoughtlessness are a definite sign of middle classness.

Bags ...you are unique, and I love you.

baubles, my teachers called it boldness! My dad called it contrasuggestibility, which he encouraged.

A friend of mine whose husband was a non-officer in the navy told me this story. She was at a posh navy dinner party. The 'wives' were chatting away over / while the men (mainly officers but not all, including her husband who wasn't, though he was promoted later) were elsewhere. When the husbands returned and the 'ladies' realised my friend's husband was not "officer class" they stopped speaking to her for the rest of the evening. I don't think she was flabbergasted, just disgusted, but I was flabbergasted when she told me. Such snobs!

Feetlebaum and Marell you are right about the ladies, wives and women. There was a revolt of the naval wives just before I married a sailor in 1967, and the navy had to stop it. So never suffered that insult.

When our lads decided to join the Australian Army Reserves, their Dad said "only if you go as officers". He didn't want anyone to subject them to snobbery. Not that there's much of that sort of thing in the Australian forces, but our youngest, now a captain, was always called 'the digger with (officer's) pips' because he was so very down to earth, and always dug his own latrine!!!

You've got that correct, feelebaum. My DH did his National Service at that time and oddly enough spoke of that description just the other day. Don't think much has changed.

baubles, I'm with you there. Bags is quietly self-confident, while being respectful of others.

Bags you are the most self confident person I have ever known! I'm full of admiration and I'm taking lessons

On service attitudes, I seem to recall the description 'Officers and their Ladies, NCOs and their wives, other ranks and their women...', although I wouldn't swear to its accuracy!

My service time was the latter part of the 1950s - I wonder how much it has all changed since then?

Goodo, anno! And as my earlier post on the thread said, what defines middle class is, quite simply, education. Education is what made the middle classes emerge and education is what they stand for now, and gives them strength in the face of both outright snobbishness and inverted snobbishness.

<Ponder> Maybe true middle classness is a lack of snobbery caused by open-mindedness caused by good education.

Bags, we are of one mind on this. In my post near the beginning of this thread I said: Not particularly caring what class people think you are.

I suspect that all the armed forces are as class-ridden as ever. I have spent some time looking up the origin of the description of the British troops in WW1 as 'lions led by donkeys' - it seems that a similar phrase was used as early as 1871, of the French army.
My grandson is waiting for a date to enter the RN - he won't be going in as an officer cadet because he doesn't have the requisite A-levels, but he will be getting specialist training as a Bomb Clearance Diver. With unemployment running so high in East Yorkshire, this is his best chance of a career but I have mixed feelings about it. He has signed up for 18 years.

Spent 3 years living in Germany, 'attached' to the Army.
One of the best 'putdowns' : 'I remember her when she was a rankers wife'.

It seemed that the Army emphasised class divide.
We were given 'Officer status' which meant we were allocated a bigger house, had a larger dining table and sideboard (presumably for entertaining!) when 'other' families were often squashed into smaller properties.

Those Officers who had 'come up throught the ranks' referred to Sandhurst Officers (mostly also educated in Public Schools) as 'Ruperts'.

Officers children were sent back to the U.K. often to be educated in 'minor' public schools, we had our boys with us and they attended the 'Army' school.
A bad move, educationally, as the ethos of the school was not to encourage individual achievement. ( No. 2 son was furious that he was only allowed to sit a maximum of 8 GCSEs, when his brother passed 11 '0' levels just before we moved).

I hope things have changed!

Greatnan That's probably less to do with his accent than the irritation factor of all advertisements.

My Northern accent has never held me back and I think if other people had a problem with it - it was their problem! I don't mind if it stops me being middle class!
All my grandchidren grew up in Kent and have accentless voices. When they moved to Yorkshire, the locals were intrigued and often asked them to say something in their 'posh' accent. After several years 'up North', only one of the ten had picked up a bit of the local accent - and I think she did it for fun. She is now at university in Hull.
When three of them moved to NZ they had no trouble fitting in and again the 'natives' seemed to like the way they spoke.
Perhaps it is because they are all quite confident and outgoing.
One thing I have found is that advertisers tend to like regional accents because people trust us more - perhaps they think we are too thick to be con artists!
Much as I love the Scottish accent normally, I do find the man on the Co-op ad who says 'guid with fuid' a bit irritating.

Agree

Middle class, for me, is having the confidence to not mind if you don't fit in with 'the crowd', so one acquires a look which puts people off making snobbish comments or asking snobbish questions about your accent or which school you went to. They somehow know that you don't care what they think about your open and clear northern vowels and that you are not impressed with posh names and labels and categorisations.

And so on.

A good anti-snob education is a strength, and very middle class.

I think that's natural, Sel. When my daughter, aged 8, went to stay with her gran in Manchester for a week she came back with a broad northern accent - it just wore off after a couple of days!

Confession (gulp) when I moved from Lancashire to Surrey in the 70s, I spent quite a considerable time losing my Northern accent as I felt like a fish out of water. I would try to avoid having a 'bath' or cutting the 'grass' in case I was caught out. You can imagine the state I lived in, dirty and kept losing the cat!

People move around much more now and I'd like to think I wouldn't bother but I still find myself adopting the speech patterns of who I'm with, to some degree. Back up North, I try and speak Northern, down in the Surrey Stockbroker belt I can vary from regal to Eastend.

Pathetic or what?

Margaret, your German English comparison on class matters reminded me of the Ford Motor manufacturers back in the 70s. It was owned by a German company then, and there was a great deal of industrial unrest in the English one, and very little in the German one, which had similar pay and conditions. The execs came over to the English branch to see what was going wrong.

They concluded that the problem in the English one, was that the executives lived in a different area from the workers, spoke a different version of English and sent their children to different schools, and this was the basis and cause of the deep mistrust leading to industrial unrest.

This was a classic case of class divisions causing unnecessary problems.

Johanna Karl Marx had no time for lazy people who did not work. He lumped the idle rich and the idle poor together in his condemnation! (Of course, not all rich are idle, and not all poor are idle by any means, but some are)

Hmmn.
When I first came here in 1972 I made some private observations. At that time I thought there seems to be a working class , an upper class, both having fun, and a middle class propping up both..
That still seems to be the case for me.
There are endless immigrants who need support, 75% of land in this country is still in private hands....
Although I am not a sociologist, it is just a thought.

Being middle class to me means being well spoken, well mannered and well dressed...

I have never heard of anything of the kind in NZ. A great many of the younger generation are of mixed blood and even more of their children are. It may soon be very hard to find people of 'white European Stock' there.

McLaren buggies, and having children with names like Rollo and Lottie. (not really, I just made that up to enter the competition).